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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



An Estimate of 

The Value and Influence 

Of 



Works of Fiction 

In Modern Times 



Thomas Hill Green 

An Estimate of 

The Value and Influence 

Of 

Works of Fiction 

In Modern Times 

Edited With Introduction and Notes 

Fred Nelvton Scott 

Professor of Rhetoric in the University 
of Michigan 



George Wahr 
Ann Arbor 
Jfichifan 
1911 



^ 



s 
**<£ 



copyright 

Fred Newton Scott 

1911 



THE ANN ARBOR PRESS 
ANN ARBOR, MICH. 



©GU283435 



PREFACE 

For a good many years I have used this essay 
of Green's with an advanced class in the theory 
of prose fiction. It has worked well. It always 
arouses discussion, and in doing so it has the 
great virtue that it imperiously leads the argu- 
ment azvay from superficialities and centers it 
upon fundamentals. Its service as a stimulus 
to high thinking cannot easily be overestimated. 
For any student, and especially for one who has 
known only the unidea'd criticism of fiction so 
popular today, it is a fine thing to come in con- 
tact with a high-minded, sturdy, and uncomprom- 
ising thinker such as Green is. As Green says 
of the hearer of tragedy, "He bears about him, 
for a time at least, among the rank vapors of the 
earth, something of the freshness and fragrance 
of the higher air." / trust that this reprint, by 
making the essay more easily accessible than it 
has been heretofore, will help to raise the grade 
of student thought and taste and criticism. 

F. N. S. 

University of Michigan 
December i, 19 10 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction 9 

I. Principles op Art 19 

a. Epic, Drama, and Novel 19 

b. Imitation vs. Art 21 

c. Nature the Creation of Thought. . . 22 

d. The 'Outward' aspect of Nature. . . 23 

e. Conquest of Nature by Art 24 

f. The Artist as Idealizer 26 

g. The Epic 27 

h. Tragedy as Purifier of the Passions 29 

i. Tragedy the Elevation of Life 33 

j. Conditions Favorable to Tragedy. . 34 

II. The Novel an Inferior Form op Art. 35 

a. Beginnings of the Novel 35 

b. Characteristics of the Spectator. . . 36 

c. The Modern Novel a Reflection of 

Ordinary Life 38 

d. Naturalism vs. Idealism 43 

e. Tragedy and the Novel 44 

f . The Epic and the Novel 47 

g. Poetry and Prose 49 

h. The Novel an Incomplete Presenta- 
tion of Life 52 



i. Prudence the Novelist's Highest 

Morality 54 

j. Evil Effects of Novel-reading 56 

III. True Function of thk Novsi, 60 

a. A Widener of Experience 60 

b. An Expander of Sympathies 63 

c. A Creator of Public Sentiment. ... 69 

d. A Leveller of Intellects 69 

APPENDIX. 

a. An Appreciation of Green's Essay. 72 

b. Hegel on the Novel JJ 



INTRODUCTION 

Thomas Hili, Green was born in Birkin, 
Yorkshire, April 7, 1836. His early education 
was acquired first at home under his father, the 
rector of Birkin, then at Rugby, where he was 
sent at the age of fourteen. In 1855 he entered 
Balliol College, Oxford, and came under the in- 
fluence of Jowett, afterwards famous as Master 
of Balliol and translator of Plato. Though he 
matured early, Green was not a brilliant student. 
On the contrary, he appeared to be indolent and 
sluggish. "No man," wrote one of his fellow- 
students in 1862, "is driven with greater diffi- 
culty to work not to his taste. . . . He wrote 
some of the best college essays: he never sent 
them in on the right day, and might generally 
be seen on the Monday pondering over essays 
which every one else had sent in on the Friday 
night." These traits, however, as it proved later, 
were the index not of a vagrant mind, but of in- 
dependence of thought and of preoccupation 
with weightier matters. To quote again from the 
tribute of a fellow-student: "On everything he 
said or wrote there was stamped the impress of 



a forcible individuality, a mind that thought for 
itself, and whose thoughts had the rugged 
strength of an original character wherein grim- 
ness was mingled with humor, and practical 
shrewdness with a love for abstract speculation." 
In the end, his solid qualities of mind and char- 
acter made so strong an impression upon the 
University authorities that in i860 he was elected 
fellow of Balliol. At the same time he became 
lecturer on ancient and modern history. Though 
from the beginning of his student life he had 
been drawn to an academic career and especially 
to the study of philosophy, he was now for a 
period undecided what to make his life-work. At 
one time he thought of going into journalism in 
India. In 1864, having accepted a place with the 
koyal Commission on Middle Class Schools, he 
prepared a valuable report upon the organization 
of high schools and their relation to the univer- 
sity. Finally, however, in 1866, his indecision 
was brought to an end. Obtaining an appoint- 
ment in that year to a position on the teaching 
staff of Balliol College, he settled down to the 
work of a tutor in philosophy. When Jowett 
was made Master of Balliol, Green became, un- 
der him, the responsible manager of the college, 
performing the manifold small duties of the po- 
sition with patience, thoroughness, and tact. 

In 1 87 1 he was married to Miss Charlotte Sy- 
monds, sister of John Addington Symonds. 



10 



Twice Green was candidate for a professor- 
ship ; once in 1864 when he applied for the chair 
of moral philosophy at St. Andrews, and again in 
1867 when the Waynflate professorship of moral 
and metaphysical philosophy fell vacant at Ox- 
ford. In both cases he was unsuccessful. It was 
not until 1878, by his election to the Whyte's pro- 
fessorship of moral philosophy, that he obtained 
the position and the independence he had long 
deserved. His enjoyment of the honor was 
brief. He died of blood-poisoning, after an ill- 
ness of only ten days, March 26, 1882. 

Green's character was compounded of a variety 
of elements. The shyness and reserve character- 
istic of many cultivated Englishmen, was accent- 
uated in his case by a natural austerity and an 
absorption in serious thought. But though his 
temper was puritanic and inclined to moroseness, 
there was no sourness or cynicism in it. "If," 
he wrote to Miss Symonds, "I am rather a mel- 
ancholy bird, given to physical fatigue and de- 
pression, yet I have never known for a moment 
what it was to be weary of life, as the youth of 
this age are fond of saying that they are. The 
world has always seemed very good to me." 
Grim though he might be outwardly, he had a 
keen sense of humor and a warmth of interest in 
his fellows that made him, for those who broke 
through his reserve, a charming companion. His 
most characteristic quality was elevation of mind. 



In the essay that is here reprinted he speaks of 
"that aspiring pride which arises from the sense 
of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject 
crowd." Something of this elevation, this aloof- 
ness from the vulgar, characterized all of his ut- 
terances and gave to them at times a solemn fer- 
vency akin to that of the Hebrew prophets. This 
trait is finely portrayed in the following descrip- 
tion of the tutor Grey (a thin disguise for Green) 
in Mrs. Ward's 'Robert Elsmere :' 

"In after years memory could always recall to 
him at will the face and figure of the speaker, 
the massive head, the deep eyes sunk under the 
brows, the midland accent, the make of limb and 
features which seemed to have some suggestion 
in them of the rude strength and simplicity of a 
peasant ancestry; and then the nobility, the fire, 
the spiritual beauty flashing through it all ! Here, 
indeed, was a man on whom his fellows might 
lean, a man in whom the generation of spiritual 
force was so strong and continuous that it over- 
flowed of necessity into the poorer, barrener 
lives around him, kindling and enriching." 

Green's contributions to philosophy were part- 
ly constructive, partly (and perhaps mainly) crit- 
ical and destructive. On the critical side, his 
greatest effort was his attack upon the philosophy 
of Hume in two masterly Introductions to an 
edition of Hume's 'Works,' published in 1874-5. 
English philosophical thinking, so Green held, 

12 



had stuck fast in the scepticism of Hume. Such 
forward movement in thought as there had 
been since the 18th Century, had come mainly 
through the writings of men like Wordsworth 
and Shelley — men who having seen deeply into 
life, had expressed themselves in imaginative, 
not in philosophical ways. To set the stagnant 
tide of speculative thinking in motion, involved 
a two-fold task: on one side the breaking down 
of the barriers erected by the sensationalist and 
materialist schools of the 17th and 18th centuries, 
and on the other side the letting in of a current of 
fresh ideas from some source outside of England. 
The first, or destructive, task Green performed 
with remarkable success in the two Introduc- 
tions. For the new and truer ideas which were 
to displace the old, he naturally looked to Ger- 
many, whose methods of research were just com- 
ing into vogue at Oxford through the influence 
of Pattison and Jowett. And since to specula- 
tive thinkers of that time German philosophy 
meant the philosophy of Hegel, Green's funda- 
mental conceptions were derived by Hegelian 
modes of thinking. In other words, he was a 
neo-Hegelian. But, as his biographer notes, he 
never committed himself unreservedly to the He- 
gelian credo. "While he regarded Hegel's sys- 
tem as the 'last word of philosophy/ he did not 
occupy himself with the exposition of it, but with 
the reconsideration of the elements in Kant of 

13 



which it was the development." That is, he was 
a neo-Kantian as well as a neo-Hegelian. Of his 
constructive thinking in these channels the most 
complete embodiment is his 'Prolegomena to 
Ethics.' 

Though naturally his contributions to philos- 
ophy are first in bulk and importance, Green's 
writings cover a considerable range of subjects. 
Listed in the order of publication, they are as 
follows: 'The Force of Circumstances,' pub- 
lished in Undergraduate Papers, 1858; 'An Esti- 
mate of the Value and Influence of Prose Fic- 
tion/ published as a prize essay, 1862 ; 'The Phil- 
osophy of Aristotle' and 'Popular Philosophy in 
its relation to Life,' North British Review, Sept., 
1866, and March, 1868; Introductions to 'Hume's 
Treatise of Human Nature' 1874-5 ; 'The Grad- 
ing of Secondary Schools,' Journal of Education, 
May, 1877 ; Review of E. Caird's 'Philosophy of 
Kant,' Academy, Sept. 22, 1877; 'Mr. Spencer 
on the Relations of Subject and Object,' Contem- 
porary Reviezv, Dec, 1877; 'Mr. Spencer on the 
Independence of Matter,' ibid., March, 1878; 
'Mr. Lewes' Account of Experience,' ibid., July, 
1878; review of J. Caird's 'Introduction to the 
Philosophy of Religion,' Academy, July 10, 
1880; 'Answer to Mr. Hodgson,' Contemporary 
Review, January, 1881 ; review of J. Watson's 
'Kant and his English Critics,' Academy, Sep- 
tember 17, 24, 1881 ; 'Liberal Legislation and 

14 



Freedom of Control,' 1881 ; 'The Work to be 
done by the New Oxford High School,' 1882; 
'Prolegomena to Ethics,' 1883; 'The Witness of 
God' and 'Faith' (delivered in 1870 and 1877, 
and at the time printed for private circulation), 
1884. 

All of the foregoing, with the exception of the 
'Prolegomena to Ethics,' are included in the 
'Works' edited by R. L. Nettleship (3 Vols., 
1885, 2d Ed. 1889, Longmans). The 'Works' 
contain, in addition, the following writings not 
previously published: An essay on 'The Influ- 
ence of Civilization on Genius'; an essay on 
'Christian Dogma' ; an article on 'Mr. Lewes' Ac- 
count of the Social Medium,' written for the 
Contemporary Review, but not used; four lec- 
tures or addresses on the New Testament; four 
lectures on 'The English Commonwealth' ; a ser- 
ies of lectures on 'The Philosophy of Kant,' on 
'Logic' and on 'The principles of Political Obli- 
gations'; a lecture on 'The Different Senses of 
Freedom as Applied to Will and to the Moral 
Progress of Man' ; and a fragment on 'Immortal- 
ity.' 

Aside from occasional references to poetry and 
art in his philosophical writings, as, for example, 
in the opening paragraphs of the 'Prolegomena,' 
the essay on fiction here reprinted is Green's only 
venture in the field of aesthetic criticism. When 
we remember that it was one of his earliest pro- 

15 



ductions, having been submitted for the Chancel- 
lor's prize in 1862, when Green was but 26 years 
of age, the maturity of both style and contents 
seems remarkable It is in fact a monumental 
piece of literary criticism, sufficient to establish 
the reputation of many a lesser writer. At the 
same time, however, there is about it an air of 
constraint which shows that the author was not at 
ease in this kind of speculation. He was fencing, 
so to speak, with his left hand. His mind was 
so absorbed in the metaphysical, ethical, and re- 
ligious aspects of experience that upon the aes- 
thetic as such he had little attention to bestow. 
When he approached aesthetic problems at all it 
was for the purpose of obtaining data which he 
could employ in other fields of thought. He was 
obviously not in sympathy with the aims of Eng- 
lish novelists. He had no expert knowledge of 
the history of fiction in England, and no knowl- 
edge at all, so far as appears, of its history in 
other countries.' Probably he misunderstood the 
relation, in certain particulars, of the novel to the 
epic. Nevertheless, his appreciation of concrete 
works of art was so genuine and profound, his 
insight so clear, his expressed judgments so can- 
did, that any contact of his mind with art, liter- 
ary or other, could not fail to be illuminating. 
Whatever its limitations, the essay has at least 
one distinguishing merit: in it a fundamental 
principle of criticism is applied with merciless 
16 



rigor to the solution of a literary problem. The 
products of such a method are certain to be 
interesting and valuable. Whether we agree with 
the author's conclusions or not, we can at least 
see whence he derives them and feel the stimulus 
which always comes from the spectacle of a pow- 
erful mind grappling in deadly earnest with mo- 
mentous questions of art and life. 



17 



AN ESTIMATE 



Value and Influence of 

Works of Fiction in 

Modern Times 



I. PRINCIPLES OF ART 

I. We commonly distin- 
A. epic, drama, guish writings which appeal 
and novel directly to the emotions 

from those of which the im- 
mediate object is the conveyance of knowledge, 
by applying to the former a term of conveniently 
loose meaning, "works of imagination." Of the 
kinds included in the wide denotation of this 
term there are three, between which it seems 
difficult at first sight to draw a definite line; 
which appeal to similar feelings, and excite a 
similar interest, in the different ages to which 



each is appropriate. These are the epic poem, 
the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, 
in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, 
as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain 
end. In each men are represented, not as at 
rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-op- 
eration or collision. In each there is a combina- 
tion of two elements, an outer element of inci- 
dent, an inner of passion and character. In view 
of these common features, we might be tempted 
at first sight to suppose the difference between 
the three kinds to be merely one of form, merely 
the difference between the vehicle of prose and 
the vehicle of metre. We shall find, however, 
on deeper inquiry, that to the true artist, who 
does not find his materials in the world, but cre- 
ates them according to the inner laws by which 
the world and himself are governed, the vehicle 
is not more a part of his creation than the "im- 
passioned truth" which it conveys. Here, as else- 
where, form and substance are inseparable; and 
the difference of form that distinguishes the nov- 
el from the other kinds of composition which it 
seems for the present to have superseded, sym- 
bolises, or rather is identical with, a different 
potency in the art by which the substance is cre- 
ated. 1 



1 "Though in its most general sense the substance 
and matter of all fine art is the same, issuing from 
the common source of the human desire for expres- 

20 



2. Mere copying is not art. 
B. imitation The farther the artist rises 
vs. art above the stage of imitation, 

the higher is his art, the 
more elevating its influence on those who can 
enter into its spirit. If the landscape-painter does 
nothing more than represent nature as seen by 
the outward eye, the vulgar objection against 
looking at pictures — "I can see as fine a view 
as this any day" — is unquestionably valid. But 
if the painter is anything better than a photog- 
rapher, he does far more than this. He brings 
nature before us, as we have seen it, perhaps, 
only once or twice in our lives, under the influ- 
ence of some strong emotion. He does that for 

sion, yet the region of fancy corresponding to each 
medium of utterance is molded by intercourse with that 
medium, and acquires an individuality which is not 
directly reducible to terms of any other region of 
aesthetic fancy. Feeling, in short, is modified in be- 
coming communicable ; and the feeling which has be- 
come communicable in music is not capable of re-trans- 
lation into the feeling which has become communicable 
in painting. Thus the arts have no doubt in common a 
human and even rational content — rational in so far as 
the feelings which are embodied in expression, for 
expression's sake, arise in connection with ideas and 
purposes; but each of them has separately its own pe- 
culiar physical medium of expression and also a whole 
region of modified feeling or fancy which constitutes 
the material proper to be expressed in the medium and 
according to the laws of each particular art." — B. 
Bosanquet, 'The Relation of the Fine Arts to One 
Another' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society). 

21 



us which we cannot do for ourselves; he repro- 
duces those moments of spiritual exaltation in 
which "we feel that we are greater than we 
know" — moments which we can remember, and 
of which the mere memory may be the light of 
our lives, but which no act of our own will can 
bring back. It is not till the distinction has been 
appreciated between nature as it is and nature 
as we make it to be, between that which we see 
and that which "having not seen we love," that 
any branch of art can be reckoned in its proper 
value. 

3. In one sense of the 
c. nature the wor d, it would no doubt be 

CREATION 

of thought true to sa y tnat nature IS 

simply and altogether that 
which we make it to be. Modern philosophy has 
discarded the language which represented our 
knowledge of things as the result of impressions 
and the transmission of images. 2 If we still not 
only speak but think of ourselves as primarily 
passive and in contact with an alien world, this 
arises simply from the difficulty of conceiving a 
pure spontaneous activity. Driven from the 
crude imagination which found the primary con- 
dition of knowledge in the reception of "ideas" 
from without, "common sense" took refuge in 
the more refined hypothesis of unknown objects, 

8 As, e. g. } in the philosophy of Locke. 



which cause our sensations, and through sensa- 
tions our knowledge. 3 But this standing-ground 
has been swept away by the consideration that 
such a cause may be found within as well as 
without, in the laws of the subject's activity as 
well as in objects confessedly beyond the reach 
of cognition. Our ultimate analysis can find no 
element in knowledge which is not supplied by 
ourselves in conformity to a ruling law, or which 
exists independently of the action of human 
thought. 

4. But though the world of 
d. the "out- nature is, in this sense, a 

WARD" ASPECT u r , 

of nature world of man s own crea- 

tion, it is so in a different 
way from the world of art and of philosophy. 
Thought is indeed its parent, but thought in its 
primary stage fails to recognize it as its own, 
fails to transfer to it its own attributes of univer- 
sality, and identity in difference. It sees outward 
objects merely in their diversity and isolation. 
It seeks to penetrate nature by endless dichot- 
omy, glorying in that dissection of unity which 
is the abdication of its own prerogative.* It 

8 Probably referring to Herbert Spencer. 

4 "Life," says Professor Dewey ('Studies in Logical 
Theory/ p. 81), "proposes to maintain at all hazards the 
unity of its own process." And in a foot-note he adds : 
"Professor James's satisfaction in the contemplation of 
bare pluralism, of disconnection, of radical having-noth- 
ing-to-do-with-one-another, is a case in point. The 

23 



treats outward things as ministering to animal 
wants, as the sources of personal and particular 
pleasures and pains; and thus induces the sense 
of bondage, of collision with a world in which 
it has not yet learnt to find itself. It places the 
end of human life not in harmony with the law 
which is the highest form of itself, but in happi- 
ness, i. e., in the extraction of the greatest pos- 
sible amount of enjoyment from a world to 
which it seems to be accidentally related. The 
view of things corresponding to this stage of 
thought is what we commonly call their outward 
aspect. It is the aspect of matter-of-fact, of 
logic, of "mere morality," as opposed to that of 
art, of philosophy, and religion. 

5. The perfection of this 

E. conquest of latter and higher view in- 

nature by art volves the absolute fusion 

of thought and things. Its 

full attainment is a new creation of the world. 

Yet it is but the discovery of a relationship which 

was from the beginning, the adoption by thought 

of a child which was never other than its own. 

satisfaction points to an aesthetic attitude in which the 
brute diversity becomes itself one interesting object; 
and thus unity asserts itself in its own denial. When 
discords are hard and stubborn, and intellectual and 
practical unification are far to seek, nothing is com- 
moner than the device of securing the needed unity 
by recourse to an emotion which feeds on the very 
brute variety. Religion and art and romantic affection 
ate full of examples." 

24 



The habitual interpretation of natural events by 
the analogy of human design, to which every 
hour's conversation testifies, is the evidence that 
to the ordinary man nature presents itself not as 
something external, but, like a friend, as "an- 
other himself." The true conquest of nature is 
but the completion of the reconciliation thus an- 
ticipated in the everyday language and conscious- 
ness of mankind. When the mind has come to 
see in the endless flux of outward things, not a 
succession of isolated phenomena, but the reflex 
of its own development into an infinite variety 
of laws on a basis of identity — when the laws of 
nature are raised to the character of laws which 
regulate admiration and love — when the exper- 
iences of life are held together in a medium of 
pure emotion, and the animal element so fused 
with the spiritual as to form one organization 
through which the same impulse runs with unim- 
peded energy — then man has made nature his 
own, by becoming a conscious partaker of the 
reason which animates him and it. 5 The attain- 

5 The same thought may be found, in concrete and 
poetic form, in Wordsworth's lines : 
"And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 

25 



ment of this consummation is the end of life: 
but it is an end that can never be fully realised, 
while "dualism" remains a necessary condition 
of humanity. To most men it is as a land very 
far off, of which occasional glimpses are caught 
from some "specular mount" of philosophic or 
poetic thought. It can only approach realisation 
through the operation of a power which can pen- 
etrate the whole man, and act on every moment, 
of his life. But that power, which in the form 
of religion can make every meal a sacrament, and 
transform human passion into the likeness of di- 
vine love, is represented at a lower stage, not 
only by the unifying action of speculative philos- 
ophy, but by the combining force of art. 

6. The artist, even at his 
F. the artist lowest level, is more than an 
as idealizer imitator of imitations. 6 

Abridgment, selection, com- 
bination, are the necessary instruments of his 
craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony 
and order into the confused multiplicity of sens- 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
And mountains." 

6 Here are three beds : one existing in nature, which 
is made by God, as I think that we may say — for no one 
else can be the maker? — No. — There is another which 
is the work of the carpenter? — Yes. — And the work of 
the painter is a third? — Yes? — Beds, then, are of three 
kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them : 

26 



uous images. He substitutes for the primary 
outward aspect of things a new view, in which 
thought already finds a resting place. Just as 
strong emotion tends to make all known exist- 
ence the setting of a single form; just as intense 
meditation sees in all experience the manifesta- 
tion of a single idea; so the artist, even if he be 
merely telling a story, or painting a common 
landscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, 
and combines all in a harmony, which the un- 
taught eye does not find in the world as it is. 
He presents to us the facts in the one case, the 
outward objects in the other, as already acted 
upon by thought and emotion. In this sense ev- 
ery artist, instead of copying nature, idealises it. 
In degree and mode, however, the idealisation 
varies infinitely in the various kinds of art. It 
is by considering the height to which it is car- 
ried in the epic poem and the drama that we shall 
best appreciate its limitations in the novel. 

7. In outward form the epic 
poem is simply a narrative 

G. THE EPIC • Vf . , • ,1 

m verse. Historically it 

seems to have originated in 

the records of ancestral heroism, which passed 

from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural 

form of oral communication in an unlettered age. 

God, the maker of the bed, and the painter? — Yes, there 
are three of them. — God, whether from choice or from 
necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two 

27 



In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this out- 
ward form penetrated by a new spirit, which 
converts the narrative into the poem. There is 
no need to do violence to historical probability 
by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, 
or that he imagined himself to be doing anything 
else than representing events as they happened. 
We have simply to notice that in him facts have 
become poetry, and to ask ourselves what con- 
stitutes the change. How is it that the epic poet, 
while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet 
shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not 
to nature as we see it, in its material limitations ? 
The answer is, that though he follows the essen- 
tial laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the 
earth we live in. He fills it with actors other 
than the men who "hoard and sleep and feed" 

or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor 
ever will be made by God... Shall we, then, speak of 
Him as the natural author or maker of the bed? — Yes, 
he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of crea- 
tion He is the author of this and of all other things. — 
And what shall we sav of the carpenter — is he not also 
the maker of the bed? — Yes. — But would you call the 
painter a creator and maker? — Certainly not. — Yet if 
he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed? — 
I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as 
the imitator of that which the others make. — Good, I 
said ; then you call him who is third in the descent from 
nature an imitator? — Certainly, he said. — And the tragic 
poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imita- 
tors, he is thrice removed from the king and from the 
truth. — That appears to be so. — Plato, 'Republic,' X. 597. 

28 



around us. He places the action either in heroic 
ages — in the "past which was never present," 
when gods were more human and men more di- 
vine — or in heavenly places, and among the pow- 
ers of the air. The action is simple in proportion 
to its remoteness from the reality of life, and 
rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises 
from the operation of the most elementary pas- 
sions, the wrath of Achilles or the pride of Satan, 
in collision with an overruling power. For the 
animal wants and tricks of fortune, which en- 
tangle the web of man's affairs, it has no place. 
The animal element, if not banished from view 
altogether, becomes merely the organ of the rul- 
ing motions of the spirit; and fortune is lost in 
destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of 
the narrative cease to be mere incidents. They 
are held together by passion; they are them- 
selves, so to speak, manifestations of passion 
working with more and more intensity to the 
final consummation. Not the laws which regu- 
late curiosity, but those which regulate hope and 
awe, are the laws which they have to satisfy. 

8. In tragedy, as the pro- 
H. tragedy d uc t f a more cultivated 

AS PURIFIER OF ,, , 

the passions a S e > these characteristics ap- 
pear more strongly than in 
the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still 
legendary narratives, though narratives uncon- 
sciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, 
29 



on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It 
implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for 
its own sake, to re-create human life according 
to spiritual laws ; to transport itself from a world, 
where chance and appetite seem hourly to give 
the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it 
may work unimpeded by anything but the antag- 
onism inherent in itself and the presence of an 
overruling law. This result is attained simply 
by the action of the proper instruments of 
thought, abstraction and synthesis. The trage- 
dian presents to us scenes of life, not its contin- 
uous flow of incident. In "Macbeth," for in- 
stance, there is an hiatus of some years between 
the earlier and later acts; 7 but we are not sensi- 
ble of the void; for the passions which lead to 
the catastrophe are but the development of those 
which appear at the beginning, and to the law 
against which they struggle "a thousand years 
are but as yesterday." Time, however, is but one 
among many circumstances which the tragedian 
ignores. The common facts of life as it is, and 
always must have been, the influence of custom, 
the transition of passion into mechanical habit, 
the impossibility of continuous effort, the neces- 

7 The actual time represented in the play has been 
calculated to be nine days, with intervals of a week or 
two between Acts II and III, scenes ii and iii of Act 
IV, and scenes i and ii of Act V. See New Shakes- 
peare Society Publications, 1877-79. 

30 



sary arrangements of society, the wants of our 
animal nature and all that results from them, 
these are excluded from view, and so much only 
of the material of humanity is retained as can 
take its form from the action of the spirit, 
and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the 
synthesis keeps pace with the abstraction, for 
the tragedian creates not passions but men. The 
outer garment, the flesh itself, is stript off from 
man, that the spirit may be left to re-clothe itself, 
according to its proper impulses and its proper 
laws. The false distinctions of dress, of man- 
ner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the 
true individuality which results from the internal 
modifications of passion may be seen in clearer 
outline. These modifications are as infinite and 
as complex as the spirit of man itself; and if 
the characters of the ancient dramatists, in their 
broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finer linea- 
ments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the varia- 
tions of pure passion are as numerous and as 
subtle as those of the fleshly or customary mask 
by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. 
The essential difference lies in the fact that they 
are variations of the spiritual, not the animal, 
man; that they arise from the qualifications of 
the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with 
matter. It is this which gives tragedy its power 
over life. The problem of the diabolic nature, 

3i 



of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not for 
man to solve. He may be satisfied with the diag- 
nosis of his own disease, with the knowledge 
that it is his littleness, not his greatness, that 
separates him from the divine; that not intel- 
lectual pride, not spiritual self-assertion, but the 
meanness of his ordinary desires, the degradation 
of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal 
ends, keep him under the curse. From this 
curse tragedy, in its measure, helps to relieve 
him. It "purifies his passions" 8 by extricating 
them from their earthly immersion. For an 
hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him into a 
world of absolute ideality, where he may for- 
get his wants and his vanity, and lose himself in 
a struggle in which the combatants are the forces 
of the spirit, and of which the end is that anni- 
hilation in collision with destiny which is but the 
blank side of reconciliation with it. And though 
his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when he 
falls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed 
upon him, and he bears about him, for a time at 
least, among the rank vapours of the earth, some- 
thing of the freshness and fragrance of the 
higher air. 

8 The phrase is Aristotle's; cf. the 'Poetics,' Chap. 
vi, and, for comment, Butcher's Aristotle's Theory of 
Poetry and Fine Art,' Chapter vi. 



32 



g. In this sense, then, 
i. tragedy tragedy satisfies its defini- 

THE ELEVA- ,• itix. w u*. i 

tion of life tlon as ™ e ih&ht or eleva- 
tion of life." The two in- 
dispensable supports which render this elevation 
possible, are metrical expression and great situ- 
ations. "In the regeneration" the language of 
the market-place and the morning call may an- 
swer to the realised harmony of life; there may, 
indeed, be "the fifth act of a tragedy in every 
death-bed;" there may be no distinction of great 
or little, high or low. But it is an affectation to 
confound what shall be with what is. We cannot 
dissociate ordinary incidents from the petty 
wants out of which they ordinarily spring, nor 
common language from the common-place 
thoughts which it usually expresses. The action 
in tragedy must be relative to the situation; and 
if the situation be one which we are unable to 
separate from matter-of-fact associations, neith- 
er can the action be so separated except by an 
effort which of itself depresses the soaring spirit. 
Nor, again, if the action be high-wrought, above 
the measure of man's ordinary activity, can it 
find expression in the unrhythmical language 9 

9 The language of prose is not necessarily unrhyth- 
mical, nor is it always commonplace, as witness, for ex- 
ample, the more moving and imaginative passages of 
the English Bible. On this point consult Gummere's 
'Beginnings of Poetry,' Chapter ii (Rhythm as the 
Essential Fact of Poetry, especially pp. 56-60) ; Watts's 
article 'Poetry' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and 
the Publications of the Modern Language Association, 
xx. 4. 

33 



which corresponds to that ordinary activity. 
New wine must not be put in old bottles; nor 
must the motions of disenthralled passion be con- 
fined in vessels worn by the uses of daily life. 

10. These considerations 
j. conditions may explain to us why the 

FAVORABLE V, ,f , J 

to tragedy production of a great 

tragedy is almost an impos- 
sibility in our own time. The age most favour- 
able to it would seem to be one in which men 
stand on the edge of an old and but half-known 
world — as Aeschylus and Sophocles stood on the 
edge of the mythologic, Shakespeare on that of 
the feudal world — an age of sufficient culture 
and reflection for men to be conscious of the 
glory they have left behind, while yet civilisa- 
tion has not reached the stage of acquiescence in 
things as they are, and scepticism as to all be- 
yond them. Those great situations furnished 
by the mysterious past, in which passion quits 
the earth, soon lose their charm, and with the 
reign of wonder that of tragedy ceases. At 
Athens it gives place to the new comedy, whose 
highest boast was to copy present life(w Mo/avSpe 
koX (3U f 7roT€pos ap } vfx&v 7roT€pov aTrefiifx^craTo; ) : 10 
in modern Europe it has yielded to the novel. 

10 A saying of Aristophanes, the Grammarian, quoted 
by Syrianus on Hermogenes, IV. 101. It may be trans- 
lated : "O Menander and Life ! Which of you copies 
the other?" 

34 



II. THE NOVEL AN INFERIOR 
FORM OF ART 

ii. The novel in its proper 
A. beginnings shape did not come to the 
of the novel birth in England till the 
time of Fielding and Rich- 
ardson, but it had long been in process of for- 
mation. The seventeenth century at its close had 
lost the tragic impulse of its youth. The ecstatic 
hope of a new world, combined with the sad and 
wondering recollection of the old, which had 
raised the human spirit to the height of the 
Shakesperian tragedy, had died out, and the age 
had become eminently satisfied with itself. Wits, 
philosophers, and poets, alike were full of the 
present time. While the wits complimented each 
other on their superiority to the weaknesses of 
mankind, they made no scruple of indulging 
those weaknesses in their own persons. It was 
part of their business to do so, for it was part of 
"life." The only difference between them and 
other men was that they were weak and laughed 
over it, while others were weak and serious. 
Philosophers congratulated themselves on their 
new enlightenment; but it was an enlightenment 

35 



which gave them insight into things as they are, 
not as they are to be. "The proper study of man- 
kind," they held was "man ;" man, however, not 
in his boundless promise, but in the mean per- 
formance with which they proclaimed themselves 
satisfied. The poetry of the time was, at best, 
merely common-sense with ornamentation. It 
was neither lyrical nor tragic, though it may have 
tried to be both. It represented man neither as 
withdrawn into himself, nor as transported into 
an ideal world of action, but as observing and 
reasoning on his present affairs. The satire and 
moral essay were its characteristic forms. 

12. The most pleasing ex- 
B. character- pression of this self-satisfac- 

ISTICS OF THE f. x , , . , j . .« 

SPECTATOR tl0tl °* ^ e a £ e 1S f° unc l m tne 

Spectator, the first and best 
representative of that special style of literature — 
the only really popular literature of our time — 
which consists in talking to the public about it- 
self. Humanity is taken as reflected in the or- 
dinary life of men; and, as thus reflected, it is 
copied with the most minute fidelity. No at- 
tempt is made either to suppress the baser ele- 
ments of man's nature, or to transfigure them by 
a stronger light than that of the common under- 
standing. No deeper laws are recognised than 
those which vindicate themselves to the eye of 
daily observation, no motives purer than the 
"mixed" ones which the practical philosopher 

36 



delights to analyse, no life higher than that which 
is qualified by animal wants. The reader never 
finds himself carried into a region where it re- 
quires an effort to travel, or which is above the 
existing level of opinion and morality. It is 
from this levelness with life that the Spectator 
derives its interest — an interest so nearly the 
same, barring the absence of plot, with that of 
the novel, as to lead Macaulay to pronounce Ad- 
dison "the forerunner of the great English novel- 
ists." 11 The elements of the novel, indeed, already 
existed in Addison's time, and only required com- 
bination. Fictitious biography, which may be 
regarded as its raw material, had been written 
by Defoe with a life-like reality which has never 
since been equalled; and the popular drama fur- 
nished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn 
from present life. Let the adventures of the fic- 
titious biography, instead of being merely ex- 
ternal to the man, as in Defoe, be made subserv- 
ient to that display of character in which Addison 
had shown himself a master, and let them become 
steps in the development of a love-plot, and the 
novel — the novel of the last century, at any rate 

11 We have not the least doubt that, if Addison 
had written a novel, on an extensive plan, it would 
have been superior to any that we possess. As it is, 
he is entitled to be considered, not only as the greatest 
of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the 
great English novelists." — Maoaulay, Xife and writ- 
ings of Addison.' 

37 



— is fully formed. As was the self-contented, 
and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of 
the age, which produced the novel, such the novel 
itself continued to be. Man, comfortable and 
acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a reflex 
of the life which he no longer aspired to trans- 
cend. He wanted to enjoy himself twice over — 
in act and in fancy ; or, if the former were denied 
him, at least to explore in fancy the world of 
pleasure and excitement, of which circumstances 
abridged or disturbed his enjoyment in fact. In 
"the smooth tale, generally of love/' 12 the novel- 
ist supplied the want. 

13. This Johnsonian defi- 

C. THE MODERN V. £ , . - . 

hovelareflec- nition may be objected to as 
tion of ORDIN- merely accidental, and as 
ary life inconsistent with the ro- 

mantic character which the novel assumed in 
the hands of Sir Walter Scott. It expresses, 
however, adequately enough the view which the 
popular novelists prior to Scott took of their own 
productions. Cervantes, though in his own great 
work attaining that rhapsody of grotesqueness 
which lies on the edge of poetry, had yet es- 
tablished the idea of the novel as the antithesis 
of romance. These novelists, accordingly, if 
they are not always telling the reader (like 
Fielding), seem yet to be always thinking to 

""A small tale, generally of love."— Johnson's Dic- 
tionary. 

38 



themselves, how perfectly natural their stories 
are. It is on this naturalness they pride them- 
selves; and naturalness, in their sense, meant 
conformity to nature as it is commonly seen. 
This is the characteristic feature of the class. 
Whether, like Richardson, they analyse character 
from within, or, like Miss Austen, develop it in 
the outward particularities of an unruffled life — 
whether they describe, like Fielding, the buoy- 
ancy of a generous animalism, or, like Miss Edge- 
worth and Miss Burney, the precise decencies of 
conventional morality — they deal simply with 
eighteenth-century life as seen by eighteenth- 
century eyesight. All romantic virtue, all ideal- 
ised passion, they rigorously eschew. Prudence 
they make the guide, happiness the end, of life. 
And they do well. They undertake to copy pres- 
ent life, and they do so. They have to reflect 
man's habitual consciousness; it is not for them 
to anticipate a consciousness which has not yet 
been attained, or to represent man's lower na- 
ture as absorbed in a spiritual movement which, 
because we cannot arrest it, we habitually ignore. 
It is just their deficiency in this respect which 
gives them their peculiar fascination. Man is not 
really mere man, though he may think himself so. 
He is always something potentially, which he is 
not actually; always inadequate to himself; and 
as such, disturbed and miserable. The novel, on 
the contrary, represents him as being what he 

39 



vainly tries to be — adequate to himself. It offers 
to his imagination the full enjoyment of earthly 
life, unchallenged by obstinate surmises, un- 
troubled by yearnings after the divine. Ordinary 
men are satisfied with this enjoyment; the high- 
est are allured by its temptation. The "reading 
public" is charmed with the contemplation of its 
own likeness, "twice as natural" as life. Its own 
wisdom, its own wishes, its own vanity, are set 
before it in little with a completeness and finish 
which the deeper laws of the universe, vindicat- 
ing themselves by apparent disorder and misfor- 
tune, happily prevent from being attained in real 
life. 13 It is thus pleasantly flattered into con- 
tentment with itself — a contentment not dis- 
turbed by the occasional censure of practices 
which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or 
prudence as prejudicial to happiness. But the 
man of keener insight, who, instead of wrestling 

13 This rather obscure phrase may be interpreted as 
follows: The average man would like to live such a 
rounded and symmetrical life as is portrayed in the 
novel. He would like to see his wisdom justifying it- 
self/ his vanity triumphant, his selfishness achieving its 
end; and he thinks that his cravings are being satisfied. 
But the deeper laws of the universe will not be balked, 
they are lying in wait. And presently when he thinks, 
good easy man, his little bourgeois world is rounding 
into the perfect sphere, they spring up in his path, 
shatter his sugar-candy paradise, and ruthlessly vindi- 
cate themselves (that is, prove that they cannot be dis- 
regarded, that they must be reckoned with) by bring- 
ing into his life disorder and misfortune. 

40 



with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget 
it, and to place in its stead the rounded repre- 
sentation of activity which the novelist supplies, 
cannot but find the vanity of hiding his face from 
the presence which he dreads. Out of heart with 
the world about him — conscious of its actual 
meanness, and without vigor to re-cast it in the 
mould of his own thought — he fancies that after 
a sojourn in the world of fiction he may come 
back braced for his struggle with life. In his 
study, with a novel, he hopes to overlook the 
walls of his prison-house, to see the beginning 
and the end of human strife. But he soon finds 
himself in the embrace of the very power which 
he sought to escape. Here is the world itself 
brought back to him. Here is a perfect copy of 
that which in actual experience he sees but par- 
tially. The mirror is but too truly held up to 
nature. The getting and spending, the marrying 
and giving in marriage, the dominion of fortune 
which makes life a riddle, the prudential motives 
and worship of happiness which hide its divinity, 
these meet him here as they meet him in life, un- 
transmuted, unidealised. Yet the charm of art 
overcomes him. The perfectness of the repre- 
sentation, the skill with which the incidents are 
combined to result in a crowning happiness be- 
hind which no sorrow seems to lie, make him 
find a pleasure in the copy which he cannot find 
in actual life, when in personal and painful col- 

4i 



lision with it. But meanwhile he gains no real 
strength, he reaches no new height of contem- 
plation. He comes back to the world, as a man 
with a diseased digestion, after living for a time 
on spiced meats, comes back to ordinary food. 
He has not braced the assimilative power of his 
thought by a flight into the ideal world, or learnt 
even for a time to turn "matter to spirit by sub- 
limation strange." He has remained on the 
earth, and though his fancy has for the hour 
given the earth a charm, he is no better able 
than he was before to raise his eyes from its 
dead level, or remove the limits of its horizon. 

14. Thus, then, the old quarrel of the philos- 
opher with the imitative arts seems to be revived 
in respect of the novel. But though novel-writ- 
ers might be banished from a new republic, 14 it 
would not be as artists, but for the inferiority of 
their art. An artist indeed the novelist is; he 

"As poets were from the republic of Plato. "When 
any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so 
clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and 
makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, 
we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy 
and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that 
in our state such as he are not permitted to exist; the 
law will not allow them. And so when we have anoint- 
ed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his 
head, we shall send him away to another city. For we 
mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and 
severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style 
of the virtuous only, and will follow those models 
which we prescribed at first when we began the edu- 
cation of our soldiers." — Plato, 'Republic,' III. 398. 

42 



combines events and persons with reference to 
ends; he concentrates into a dialogue of a few- 
sentences an amount of feeling and character 
which it would take real men some hours to ex- 
press ; he imparts a rapidity to the stream of in- 
cident quite unlike the sluggishness of our daily 
experience. In this sense he does not copy what 
we see, but shows us what we can not see for 
ourselves. Our complaint against him is that the 
aspect of things which he shows us is merely the 
outward and natural, as opposed to the inner or 
ideal. His answer would probably be either that 
the ideal, in any sense in which it can be opposed 
to the natural, must be false and delusive; or 
that it is merely an accident of novel-writing, as 
hitherto practised, and not anything essential to 
this species of composition, which has prevented 
it from exhibiting the highest aspect of things; 
or, finally, that admitting the view which the 
novel presents to be necessarily lower than the 
poetic, it yet is a more useful view for man to 
contemplate. 

15. Much fruitless contro- 
d. naturalism versy between naturalism 
vs. idealism an d idealism in art might 

have been saved by a con- 
sideration of the true character of the antithesis. 
It becomes unmeaning as soon as nature is ex- 
panded to the fulness of the idea. And so ex- 
panded it may be, for, according to the old for- 

43 



mula, it is always in flux. It is never in being, 
always in becoming. As has been already pointed 
out, it is what we see; and we see according to 
higher and lower laws of vision. We may look 
at man and the world either from without or 
from within. We may observe man's actions 
like other phenomena, and from observation 
learn to ascribe them to certain general but dis- 
tinct motives and faculties, which we do not refer 
to any higher unity; or, on the other hand, by 
the light of our own consciousness we may recog- 
nise that in man of which no observation of his 
actions could tell us — something which is in him, 
but yet is not his own; which combines with all 
his faculties, but is none of them; which gives 
them a unity, to which their diversity is merely 
relative. So again with regard to the phenom- 
ena of the world; we may look on these either 
simply as phenomena, or as manifestations of 
destiny or divine will. The former view of mari 
and the world we may conveniently call natural, 
because the only view that mere observation can 
give us; the latter ideal, because making obser- 
vation posterior to something given in thought. 
1 6. The tragedian, then, 
E. tragedy idealises, because he starts 

AND THE , '..,. yj , 

novel irom within. He reaches, 

as it were, the central fire, 

in the heat of which every separate faculty, every 

animal want, every fortuitous incident is melted 

44 



down and lost. We never could observe in actual 
experience passion such as Lear's, or meditation 
such as Hamlet's, fusing everything else into it- 
self. Facts at every step would interfere to pre- 
vent such a possibility. But let us place our- 
selves, by the poet's help, within the soul of Lear 
or Hamlet, and we shall be able to follow the 
process by which the spiritual power, taking the 
form of passion in the one, and of thought in 
the other, and working outwards, draws every- 
thing into its own unity, according to the same 
activity of which, however impeded by the "im- 
perfections of matter," we are conscious in our- 
selves. The incidents of the tragedy are wholly 
subordinate, issuing either from this spiritual en- 
ergy of the actors on the one hand, or, on the 
other, from destiny, to whose throne the poet 
penetrates. They thus present an aspect entirely 
different from that of events which we approach 
from without. The novel, on the contrary, starts 
from the outside. Its main texture is a web of 
incidents through which the motions of the spirit 
must be discerned, if discerned at all. These in- 
cidents must be probable, must be such as are 
consistent with the observed sequences of the 
world. The view of man, therefore, which we 
attain through them, can only be that which is 
attainable by observation of outward actions and 
events; or, in other words, according to the dis- 
tinction which we have attempted to establish, it 

45 



is the natural view, not the ideal. Its character 
corresponds to its origin. Observation shows us 
man not as self-determined, but as the creature 
of circumstances, as a phenomenon among other 
phenomena. As such, too, he is presented to us 
in the novel. We do not see him, as in tragedy, 
standing in the strength of his own spirit, re- 
making the world by its power, determined by it 
for good or evil, dependent on it for all that may 
be attractive or repellent about him. The hero 
of a novel attracts in part by his physiognomy, 
his manner, or even his dress ; his character is 
qualified by circumstances and society; his im- 
pulses vary according to the impressions of out- 
ward things; he is the sport of fortune, depend- 
ent for weal or woe on the acquisition of some 
external blessing which the development of the 
plot may or may not bestow on him. As cir- 
cumstances make his life what it is, so the par- 
ticular combination of circumstances, called hap- 
piness, constitutes its end. Instead of losing his 
merely personal and particular self, as in the cat- 
astrophe of a tragedy, he satisfies it with its ap- 
propriate pleasure. "He that loveth wife or chil- 
dren more than me, is not worthy of me," are 
the words of the Author of the Christian life. 
"Marry, enjoy domestic bliss, and thou hast at- 
tained the end of virtue" — such is the ordinary 
moral of the ordinary novel; nay, the only con- 
sistent moral of the consistent novel. As the 
46 



novelist sows, so must he reap; as his plot is, 
such must its consummation be. In the body of 
the work he must, from the nature of the case, 
represent men as they appear in fact, and he can- 
not fitly round it off by representing them as they 
are only in idea. He cannot step at pleasure from 
one sphere of art to another; by attempting to 
do so he destroys the harmony without which 
there is no art at all, and leaves us with a sense 
of dissatisfaction and unreality. The reader, who 
through the whole three volumes till close upon 
the end has been travelling in an atmosphere of 
ordinary morality and every-day aspiration, 
knows not how in the last chapter to breathe the 
air of a higher life. 

17. It may be objected to 
F. the epic this limitation of the capa- 
novel bilities of the novel, that it 

must stand on the same foot- 
ing with the epic poem, which is no less made up 
of a texture of incident, and which, therefore, 
according to the present argument, can only 
reach the springs of man's actions from without. 
Such an objection has some truth with reference 
to the Homeric poems. These, as we have seen, 
have the legendary narrative for their primitive 
element, and in so far as they are merely a re- 
flex of Greek life in the Homeric age, their in- 
terest is that of a novel, not properly of the epic. 
The true epic (of which the "Paradise Lost" 

47 



would seem to be a less mixed form than the 
Iliad or Odyssey), no less than tragedy, seizes 
the idea of a self-determined spirit on the one 
hand, and of destiny or divine law on the other. 
These are the primary springs from which it 
makes action and incident issue, with a perfect 
subordination which the laws of our lower na- 
ture and of social life must prevent from being 
realised in the world of experience, and which 
the novelist therefore, tied down to the world of 
experience, only offends us by attempting to ex- 
hibit. The essential character of the novel is not 
changed by its assumption of the form of a ro- 
mance. In the romantic world of the middle 
ages, the great Italian poets did indeed find their 
materials. To their eyes it was a world in which 
hope and wonder might roam at large: it fur- 
nished actions which, glorified by them, became 
manifestations of the divine and heroic in man. 
But it is another world as seen by the novelist, 
even by such a one as Walter Scott. The ro- 
mantic life which he depicts is simply the life 
which we see our own neighbors live, with more 
picturesque situations, with more to excite curi- 
osity in the reader, and activity in the imaginary 
hero. We gain more from him, it is true, than 
from those copies of the too familiar faces 
around us which are the staple commodity in 
novels of the day. He at least carries us into 
scenes of adventure, where we may forget the 

48 



"smooth tale" of our nineteenth-century life. 
But further he cannot go, for he approaches men 
from without. He does not reach, by other 
methods than observation, to any a priori affec- 
tion of the spirit, and to this subordinate incident. 
Had he done so, he could not have uttered him- 
self in the language of common life. In the 
world of heroes or angels, i. e., of men idealised, 
to which the epic poet raises us, he sustains us 
by the power of verse. The exalted action and 
the poetic expression are as essentially correla- 
tive in the epic, as are the natural incident and 
the prosaic expression in the novel. 

18. The hostility of Words- 
G. poetry worth to the "poetic dic- 
and prose tion" of his time rested on 
principles of which he 
scarcely seems himself to have been conscious. 15 
The poets of the last century had lost the genu- 
ine sense of their high calling. Their produc- 

15 "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, be- 
cause in that condition the essential passions of the 
heart find a better soil in which they can attain their 
maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer 
and more emphatic language; because in that condition 
of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of 
greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more ac- 
curately contemplated, and more forcibly communi- 
cated.. ..The language, too, of these men has been 
adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its 
real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of 
dislike or disgust), because such men hourly communi- 

49 



tions for the most part were, at best, practical 
philosophy in verse. They observed the outer 
aspect of things, and to make their observations 
poetry they clothed them in "poetic diction," 
which thus became offensive, because artificial — 
because a superadded ornament, and not the 
natural expression of exalted passion or the emo- 
tion which accompanies our passage "behind the 
veil." Repugnance to this artificiality misled 
Wordsworth into the celebrated assertion that 
"between the language of prose and that of metri- 
cal composition, there neither is, nor can be, any 
essential difference:" an assertion which, as 
prompted by a feeling of the incompatibility of 
poetic language with prosaic thought, is really a 
witness to the essential antithesis between poetry 
and prose. Verse is simple, harmonious, and un- 

cate with the best objects from which the best part 
of language is originally derived ; and because, from 
their rank in society and the sameness and narrow 
circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence 
of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions 
in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, 
such a language arising out of repeated experience and 
regular feeling, is a more permanent, and a far more 
philosophical language, than that which is frequently 
substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are 
conferring honor upon themselves and their art in pro- 
portion as they separate themselves from the sym- 
pathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious 
habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle 
tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation." — 
Wordsworth, Preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads/ 

50 



familiar. It is thus the fitting organ for that 
energy of thought which simplifies the phenom- 
ena of life by referring them to a spiritual prin- 
ciple; which blends its shifting colours in the 
light of a master-passion, and passes from the 
contradictory data of the common understanding 
to the unity of a deeper consciousness. Even the 
spiritualist philosopher, no less than the poet, 
would have to speak in verse, if, instead of mak- 
ing statements, he portrayed: if, besides assert- 
ing that "all things are to be seen in God," he 
sought to excite in the reader the emotion ap- 
propriate to the sight. Prose is the "oratio 
soluta." It is complex, irregular, inharmonious. 
It thus corresponds to the natural or phenom- 
enal view of life; the view of it, that is, in its 
diversity, as qualified in innumerable modes by 
animal wants and apparent accident, and not 
harmonised by the action of the spirit. 16 The 
novelist must express himself in prose, because 
this is his view of life : and this must be his view 
of life, because he thus expresses himself. It 
is indeed a view which may vary according to 
the circumstances of the case, but only within 
definite limits. There is an "earnestness" about 
some of our modern novelists, Miss Bronte for 
instance, which would have seemed out of place 

18 On the relations of prose and poetry, see Alden's 
'An introduction to Poetry,' pp. 23-28, 128-138, 160- 
164, and the references there given. 

51 



to those of fifty years ago ; but this is merely be- 
cause the life they see around them is more "earn- 
est." It presents to them scenes of sterner signifi- 
cance than were to be found among the coquetry 
and dissipation of the fashionable world or the dull 
courtesies of a country house. But that they do 
not transcend this outward life we have one 
crucial proof. Just in so far as each of us learns 
to regard his own individual being from within, 
and not from without, does he discard depend- 
ence on happiness as arising from external cir- 
cumstances, and becomes already in idea, as he 
tends to become in reality, his own world and 
his own law. No novelist attains to the asser- 
tion of this spiritual prerogative. As we follow 
in sympathy the story of his hero, we find our- 
selves lifted up and cast down as fortune changes, 
our life brightening as the clouds break above, 
and darkening as they close again. If the author 
chooses to disappoint us with "a bad ending," he 
leaves us, not as we are left at the conclusion of 
a tragedy, purified from personal desires, but 
vexed and sorrowful, sadder but not wiser men. 
H. the novel *?' By the mere explana- 
an incomplete tion of the difference be- 
presentation tween the ideal and the 
natural, the poetic and novel- 
istic, views of the world, we may seem to have 
already settled the question as to the beneficial ef- 
fects of each. The question, be it observed, is not 

52 



as to the comparative influence of the discipline of 
art and that of real life. The man who seeks his 
entire culture in art of any kind will soon find 
the old antagonism between speculation and ac- 
tion begin to appear. There will be a chasm, 
which he cannot fill, between his life in the 
closet and his life in the world ; his impotence to 
carry his thought into act will limit and weaken 
the thought itself. But this ill result will equally 
ensue, whether the art in which he finds his nur- 
ture be that of the novelist or that of the poet. 
The novel-reader sees human action pass before 
him like a panorama, but he feels none of its 
pains and penalties; his fancy feeds on its pleas- 
ures, but he has not to face the struggle of re- 
sistance to pleasure, or the suffering which fol- 
lows on indulgence. Nor is it merely from that 
weakness of effect which, in one sense, must 
always belong to representation as opposed to 
reality, that the novel suffers. The representa- 
tion itself is incomplete. The novelist, like every 
other artist, must abridge and select. For many 
of the elements whose action builds up our hu- 
man soul, there is no place in his canvas. A 
great part of the discipline of life arises simply 
from its slowness. The long years of patient 
waiting and silent labor, the struggle with list- 
lessness and pain, the loss of time by illness, the 
hope deferred, the doubt that lays hold on delay 
— these are the tests of that pertinacity in man 

53 



which is but a step below heroism. The exhibi- 
tion of them in the novel, however, is prevented 
by that rapidity of movement which is essential 
to its fascination; and hence to one whose ac- 
quaintance with life was derived simply from 
novels, its main business would be unknown. 
They are perhaps more brought home to us by 
Defoe than by any other writer of fiction; but 
this is due to that very deficiency of artistic 
power which makes his agglomeration of de- 
tails 17 such heavy reading to all but school-boys. 
20. The novel, then, as be- 
i. prudence the ' mg a wor k of art, must fail 

NOVELIST'S HIGH- , * , ,, , c V£ 

est morality to teach the lesson of life 
in its completeness: as an 
inferior work of art, it has peculiar weaknesses 
of its own. However extensive the influence of 
the literature of fiction may have been, its in- 
tensity has been in inverse proportion. A great 
poem, once made our own, abides with us for 
ever. 

"Amid the fretful stir 
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world," 17 

17 Modern criticism inclines to the view that Defoe's 
"agglomeration of details" is the result of high and 
conscious art. If 'Robinson Crusoe' were kept away 
from schoolboys it would doubtless be read pleasurably 
by adults. 

18 "When the fretful stir 
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world 
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart." 

— Wordsworth, 'Tintern Abbey.' 

54 



the spirit, returning to it, may gain a fresh as- 
surance of its own birthright, and purify itself, 
as in a river of Lethe, for an ideal transition to 
its proper home. The novel, itself the reflex of 
"the fretful stir unprofitable," can exercise no 
such power. It can but make us more at home in 
the region from which a great poem transports 
us. The value of that experience of the world, 
which it is its object to impart, is commonly over- 
rated in our day. In the form in which it is im- 
parted by the novelist, we have perhaps had too 
much of it without his aid. Our external en- 
vironment is quite enough in our thoughts : we 
are not too reluctant to admit that we are what 
we seem to be, dependent for good or evil on 
circumstances which we do not make for our- 
selves. This dependence is in itself, no doubt, a 
fact ; but it ceases to be so for us when we con- 
template it in forgetfulness of that spring of 
potential freedom which underlies it, and of the 
law of duty correlative to freedom. To the ex- 
clusive consideration of it we owe those profit- 
less recipes for eliciting moral health from cir- 
cumstances which are the plague of modern liter- 
ature, and which one of our ablest writers has 
lately condescended to dispense, in an essay on 
"organisation in daily life." This circumstantial 
view of life, if we may use the term, being the 
only one that the novelist can convey, prudence 
is his highest morality. But it may be doubted 

55 



whether prudence is what any one has great need 
to learn. The plain man, who fronting circum- 
stances boldly on the one hand, looks reverently 
to the stern face of duty on the other, can dis- 
pense with its maxims. For the moral vale- 
tudinarian small benefit is to be gained from a 
doctor who will 

'"Read each wound, each weakness clear, 
Will strike his finger on the place 
And say, 'Thou ailest here and here'." 19 

It is far better for him, instead of poring over a 
detail of the causes and symptoms of the disease 
which he hugs, to be stimulated to an effort in 
which, though it be but temporary, ecstatic, and 
for an end not actually attainable, he may at least 
forget the disease altogether. Such a stimulus a 
great poem may afford him; but in the whole 
expanse of novel-literature he merely sees his 
own sickly experience modified in an infinite 
variety of reflections, till he fancies that the 
"strange disease of modern life" is the proper 
constitution of God's universe. 

21. Novel-reading thus ag- 
j. evil effects gravates two of the worst 
reading " maladies of modern times, 

self-consciousness and want 
of reverence. Many a man in these days, in- 
stead of doing some sound piece of work for 

"Matthew Arnold's 'Memorial Verses,' lines 20-22, 
adapted to the context. 

56 



mankind, spends his time in explaining to him- 
self why it is that he does not do it, and how, 
after all, he is superior to those who do. Even 
men of a higher sort never seem to forget them- 
selves in their work. Our popular writers gen- 
erally take the reader into confidence as to their 
private feelings as they go along; our men of 
action are burdened by a sense of their reputa- 
tion with "intelligent circles." No one loses him- 
self in a cause. Scarcely understanding what is 
meant by a "divine indifference" as to the fate 
of individual existences in the evolution of God's 
plan, we weary heaven with complaints that we 
find the world contrary, or that we cannot satis- 
fy ourselves with a theory of life. Thus "meas- 
uring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing our- 
selves among ourselves, we are not wise." The 
novel furnishes the standard for the measure- 
ment, and the data for the comparison. It pre- 
sents us with a series of fictitious experiences, in 
the light of which we read our own, and become 
more critically conscious of them. Instead of 
idealising life, if we may so express ourselves, 
it sentimentalises it. It does not subordinate in- 
cidents to ideas ; yet it does not # treat them simply 
as phenomena to excite curiosity, but as misfor- 
tunes or blessings to excite sentiment. The 
writer of the "Mill on the Floss" reaches almost 
the tragic pitch towards the close of her book, 
and if she had been content to leave us with the 

57 



death of the heroine and her brother 20 in the 
flood, we might have supposed that in this case, 
as representing the annihilation of human pas- 
sion in the struggle with destiny, the novelist 
had indeed attained the ideal view of life. But 
the novelistic instinct does not allow her to do so. 
At the conclusion we are shown the other chief 
actors standing, with appropriate emotions, over 
the heroine's grave, and thus find that the catas- 
trophe has not really been the manifestation of 
an idea, but an occasion of sentiment. The hab- 
itual novel-reader, from thus looking sentiment- 
ally at the fictitious life which is the reflex of 
his own, soon comes to look sentimentally at him- 
self. He thinks his personal joys and sorrows 
of interest to angels and men; and instead of 
gazing with awe and exultation upon the world, 
as a theatre for the display of God's glory and 
the unknown might of man, he sees in it merely 
an organism for affecting himself with pains and 
pleasures. Thus regarded, it must needs lose its 
claim on his reverence, for it is narrowed to the 
limits of his own consciousness. Conversant 
with present life in all its outward aspects, he 
forgets the infinite spaces which lie around and 
above it. This confinement of view, which among 
the more intelligent appears merely as disbelief 

20 "Lover" in the original text of the essay. The 
error does not much affect the argument. 

c ,8 



in the possibilities of man, takes a more offen- 
sive form in the complacent blindness of ordin- 
ary minds. We have no wish to disparage our 
own age in comparison with any that have pre- 
ceded it. Young men have always been ignor- 
ant, and ignorance has always been conceited. 
There is, however, this difference. The ignorant 
young men of past time, such as the five sons of 
Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistone, 21 knew that they 
were ignorant, but thought it no shame: the ig- 
norant young men of our days, with the miscel- 
laneous knowledge of life which they derive 
from the popular novelists, fancy themselves 
wiser than the aged. Whoever be the philos- 
opher, the coxcomb nowadays will answer him 
not merely with a grin, but with a joke which 
he has still in lavender from Dickens or his imi- 
tators. The comic aspect of life is indeed plain 
enough to see, nor is the merely pathetic much 
less obvious; but there is little good in looking 
at either. It is far easier to laugh or to weep 
than to think; to give either a ludicrous or sen- 
timental turn to a great principle of morals or 
religion than to enter into its real meaning. But 
the vulgar reader of our comic novelists, when 
he has learnt from them a jest or a sentiment for 
every occasion of life, fancies that nothing more 
remains unseen and unsaid. 

21 In Scott's 'Rob Roy.' 

59 



III. TRUE FUNCTION OF THE 
NOVEL 

22. But there is another 
A. A widener side to this question which 
of experience W e must not allow ourselves 
to overlook. We have shown 
what the novel cannot do, and its ill effect on 
those who trust to it for their culture. We must 
not forget that it has a proper work of its own 
which, if modern progress be anything more than 
a euphemism, must be a work for good. Least 
of all should it be depreciated by the student, 
who may find in it deliverance from the neces- 
sary confinement of his actual life. For the pro- 
duction of poetic effect, as we have seen, large 
abstraction is necessary. It is with man in the 
purity of his inward being, with nature in its 
simple greatness, that the poet deals. The glory 
which he casts on life is far higher than any 
which the novelist knows, but it is only on cer- 
tain of the elements of life that it can be cast 
at all. The novelist works on a far wider field. 
With choice of subject and situation he scarcely 
need trouble himself, except in regard to his 

60 



own intellectual qualifications. Wherever human 
thought is free, and human character can dis- 
play itself, whether in the servants' hall or the 
drawing-room, whether in the country mansion 
or the back alley, he may find his materials. He 
is thus a great expander of sympathies; and if 
he cannot help us to make the world our own by 
the power of ideas, he at least carries our thought 
into many a far country of human experience, 
which it could not otherwise have reached. We 
hear much in these days of the sacrifice of the 
individual to society through professional limita- 
tions. In the progressive division of labor, while 
we become more useful as citizens, we seem to 
lose our completeness as men. The requirements 
of special study become more exacting, at the 
same time that the perfect organisation of mod- 
ern society removes the excitement of adventure 
and the occasion for independent effort. There 
is less of human interest to touch us within our 
calling, and we have less leisure to seek it be- 
yond. Hence it follows that one who has made 
the most of his profession is apt to feel that he 
has not attained his full stature as a man; that 
he has faculties which he can never use, capaci- 
ties for admiration and affection which can never 
meet with an adequate object. To this feeling, 
probably, are mainly due our lamentations over 
a past age of hero-worship and romance, when 
61 



action was more decisive and passion a fuller 
stream. Its alleviation, if not its remedy, is to 
be found in the newspaper and the novel. Every 
one indeed must lay in his own experience the 
foundation of the imaginary world which he 
rears for himself. There is a primary "virtue 
which cannot be taught." No man can learn 
from another the meaning of human activity or 
the possibilities of human emotion. But this 
ttov a-To) being given, even the cloistered student 
may find that, as his soul passes into the strife 
of social forces and the complication of individ- 
ual experience, which the newspaper and the 
novel severally represent, his sympathies break 
from the bondage of his personal situation and 
reach to the utmost confines of human life. The 
personal experience and the fictitious act and 
react on each other, the personal experience 
giving reality to the fictitious, the fictitious ex- 
pansion to the personal. He need no longer 
envy the man of action and adventure, or sigh 
for new regions of enterprise. The world is all 
before him. He may explore its recesses with- 
out being disturbed by its passions; and if the 
end of experience be the knowledge of God's 
garment, as preliminary to that of God Him- 
self, his eye may be as well trained for the "vis- 
ion beatific," as if he had himself been an actor 
in the scenes to which imagination transfers him. 
62 



23. The novelist not only 
b. an expander works on more various ele- 
of sympathies ments, he appeals to more 

ordinary minds than the 
poet. This indeed is the strongest practical proof 
of his essential inferiority as an artist. All who 
are capable of an interest in incidents of life 
which do not affect themselves, may feel the 
same interest more keenly in a novel; but to 
those only who can lift the curtain does a poem 
speak intelligibly. It is the twofold character- 
istic, of universal intelligibility and indiscrimin- 
ate adoption of materials, that gives the novel its 
place as the great reformer and leveller of our 
time. Reforming and levelling are indeed more 
closely allied than we are commonly disposed to 
admit. Social abuses are nearly always the re- 
sult of defective organisation. The demarca- 
tions of family, of territory, or of class, prevent 
the proper fusion of parts into the whole. The 
work of the reformer progresses as the social 
force is brought to bear more and more fully on 
classes and individuals, merging distinctions of 
privilege and position in the one social organism. 
The novel is one of the main agencies through 
which this force acts. It gathers up manifold 
experiences, corresponding to manifold situations 
of life; and subordinating each to the whole, 
gives to every particular situation a new charac- 
ter, as qualified by all the rest. Every good 

63 



novel, therefore, does something to check what 
may be called the despotism of situations; to 
prevent that ossification into prejudices arising 
from situation, to which all feel a tendency. The 
general novel literature of any age may be re- 
garded as an assertion by mankind at large, in 
its then development, of its claims, as against 
the influence of class and position ; whether that 
influence appear in the form of positive social 
injustice, of oppressive custom, or simply of de- 
ficient sympathy. 

24. To be what he is, the novelist must be a 
man with large powers of sympathetic observa- 
tion. He must have an eye for the "humanities" 
which underlie the estranging barriers of social 
demarcation, and in relation to which the influ- 
ence of those barriers can alone be rightly ap- 
preciated. We have already spoken of that ac- 
quiescence in the dominion of circumstance, to 
which we are all too ready to give way, and 
which exclusive novel-reading tends to foster. 
The circumstances, however, whose rule we rec- 
ognise, are apt to be merely our own or those 
of our class. We are blind to other "idola" than 
those of our own cave; we do not understand 
that the feelings which betray us into "indiscre- 
tions" may, when differently modified by a differ- 
ent situation, lead others to game-stealing or 
trade-outrages. From this narrowness of view 
the novelist may do much to deliver us. The 

64 



variations of feeling and action with those of 
circumstance, and the essential human identity 
which these variations cannot touch, are his spec- 
ial province. He shows us that crime does not 
always imply sin, that a social heresy may be the 
assertion of a native right, that an offence which 
leads to conventional outlawry may be merely the 
rebellion of a generous nature against conven- 
tional tyranny. Thus, if he does not do every- 
thing, he does much. Though he cannot reveal 
to us the inner side of life, he at least gives a 
more adequate conception of its surface. Though 
he cannot raise us to a point of view from which 
circumstances appear subordinate to spiritual 
laws, he yet saves us from being blinded, if not 
from being influenced, by the circumstances of 
our own position. Though he cannot show the 
prisoners the way of escape from their earthly 
confinement, yet by breaking down the partitions 
between the cells he enables them to combine 
their strength for a better arrangement of the 
prison-house. The most wounding social wrongs 
more often arise from ignorance than from mal- 
ice, from acquiescence in the opinion of a class 
rather than from deliberate selfishness. The 
master cannot enter into the feelings of the ser- 
vant, nor the servant into those of his master. 
The master cannot understand how any good 
quality can lead one to "forget his station"; to 
the servant the spirit of management in the mas- 

65 



ter seems mere "driving." This is only a sample 
of what is going on all society over. The rela- 
tion between the higher and lower classes be- 
comes irritating, and therefore injurious, not 
from any conscious unfairness on either side, 
but simply from the want of a common under- 
standing; while at the same time every class suf- 
fers within its own limits from the prevalence 
of habits and ideas, under the authority of class- 
convention, which could not long maintain them- 
selves if once placed in the light of general opin- 
ion. Against this twofold oppression, the novel, 
from its first establishment as a substantive 
branch of literature, has made vigorous war. 
From Defoe to Kingsley its history boasts of a 
noble army of social reformers; yet the work 
which these writers have achieved has had little 
to do with the morals — commonly valueless, if 
not false and sentimental — which they have sev- 
erally believed themselves to convey. Defoe's 
notion of a moral seems to have been the vulgar 
one that vice must be palpably punished and vir- 
tue rewarded; he recommends his "Moll Flan- 
ders" to the reader on the ground that "there is 
not a wicked action in any part of it but is first 
or last rendered unhappy and 22 unfortunate." 
The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can 
be called, is simply the importance of that pru- 

22 "Or" in Green's text. 

66 



dence which his heroes might have dispensed 
with, but for the wildness of their animal license. 
Yet both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson 
to teach mankind. The thieves and harlots whom 
Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose 
adventures he describes with the minuteness of 
affection, are what we ourselves might have been ; 
and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," 
yet the "harsh and grating cry" of suffering hu- 
manity. Fielding's merit is of the same kind; 
but the sympathies which he excites are more 
general, as his scenes are more varied, than those 
of Defoe. His coarseness is everywhere re- 
deemed by a genuine feeling for the contumeli- 
ous buffets to which weakness is exposed. He 
has the practical insight of Dickens and Thack- 
eray, without their infusion of sentiment. He 
does not moralise over the contrast between the 
rich man's law and the poor man's, over the "in- 
difference" of rural justice, over the lying and 
adultery of fashionable life. He simply makes 
us see the facts, which are everywhere under 
our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. 
He shows society where its sores lie, appealing 
from the judgment of the diseased class itself to 
that public intelligence which, in spite of the cyn- 
ic's sneer on the task of "producing an honesty 
from the combined action of knaves," has really 
power to over-ride private selfishness. The same 
sermon has found many preachers since, the un- 

67 



conscious missionaries being perhaps the greatest. 
Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His mind was 
busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism: no 
thought of reforming abuses probably ever en- 
tered it. Yet his genial human insight made him 
a reformer against his will. He who makes man 
better known to man takes the first steps toward 
healing the wounds which man inflicts on man. 
The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his 
pictures of the Scotch peasantry. He popular- 
ised the work which the Lake poets had begun, 
of re-opening the primary springs of human pas- 
sion. "Love he had found in huts where poor 
men lie," and he announced the discovery ; teach- 
ing the "world" of English gentry what for a 
century and a half they had seemed to forget, 
that the human soul, in its strength no less than 
in its weakness, is independent of the accessories 
of fortune. He left no equals, but the combined 
force of his successors has been constantly grow- 
ing in practical effect. They have probably done 
more than the journalists to produce that im- 
provement in the organisation of modern life 
which leads to the notion that, because social 
grievances are less obvious, they have ceased to 
exist. The novelist catches the cry of suffer- 
ing before it has obtained the strength, or gen- 
eral recognition, which are pre-supposed when 
the newspaper becomes its mouthpiece. The mis- 
eries of the marriage-market had been told by 

68 



Thackeray, with almost wearisome iteration, 
many years before they found utterance in the 
columns of the "Times." 

25. It may indeed be truly 
c. A creator sa id that, after all, human 
sentiment selfishness is much the same 

as it ever was; that luxury 
still drowns sympathy; that riches and poverty 
have still their old estranging influence. The 
novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new birth 
to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend 
the separations of place and circumstance; but 
it is no small thing that it should remove the bar- 
riers of ignorance and antipathy which would 
otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least 
brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables 
each class to see itself as others see it. And 
from the fusion of opinions and sympathies thus 
produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which 
oppression of any kind, whether of one class by 
another, or of individuals by the tyranny of sec- 
tarian custom, seldom appeals in vain. 

26. The novelist is a level- 
D. A leveller ^ er a ls° in another sense than 
of intellects that of which we have al- 
ready spoken. He helps to 

level intellects as well as situations. He supplies 
a kind of literary food which the weakest natures 
can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by 
the consumption of which the former sort lose 
69 



much of their weakness and the latter much of 
their strength. While minds of the lower order 
acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which 
they previously lacked, the higher seem propor- 
tionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride 
which arises from the sense of walking in intel- 
lect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no 
longer feel the bracing influence of living solely 
among the highest forms of art; they become 
conformed insensibly to the general opinion 
which the new literature of the people creates. 
A similar change is going on in every department 
of man's activity. The history of thought in its 
artistic form is parallel to its history in its other 
manifestations. The spirit descends, that it may 
rise again; it penetrates more and more 
widely into matter, that it may make the 
world more completely its own. Political 
life seems no longer attractive, now that po- 
litical ideas and power are disseminated among 
the mass, and the reason is recognised as belong- 
ing not to a ruling caste merely, but to all. A 
statesman in a political society resting on a sub- 
stratum of slavery, and admitting no limits to 
the province of government, was a very differ- 
ent person from the modern servant of "a na- 
tion of shopkeepers," whose best work is to save 
the pockets of the poor. It would seem as if 
man lost his nobleness when he ceased to govern, 
and as if the equal rule of all was equivalent to 
70 



the rule of none. Yet we hold fast to the faith 
that the "cultivation of the masses," which has 
for the present superseded the development of 
the individual, will in its maturity produce some 
higher type even of individual manhood than any 
which the old world has known. We may rest 
on the same faith in tracing the history of liter- 
ature. In the novel we must admit that the crea- 
tive faculty has taken a lower form than it held 
in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this 
form it acts on more extensive material and 
reaches more men, we may well believe that this 
temporary declension is preparatory to some 
higher development, when the poet shall idealise 
life without making abstraction of any of its 
elements, and when the secret of existence, which 
he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may 
be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common 
intelligence of mankind. 



7i 



APPENDIX 



A. AN APPRECIATION OF GREEN'S ESSAY 

It is interesting to see how the leading ideas 
in his [Green's] mind governed the treatment of 
an apparently alien material in his last piece of 
academic work, the essay on novels, which gained 
the Chancellor's prize in 1862. The essay has 
also the additional interest of being almost the 
only record of his views on art and its relation 
to life. The fundamental conception upon which 
it is based is one with which we have already 
met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed 
by a single law, animated by an undivided life, 
a whole in every part. But to human apprehen- 
sion it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos 
of elements of which each is external to the oth- 
er and all are external to our minds, and in which 
chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the 
only law. To exceptional men, or at exceptional 
crises in life, in the moments of intense insight 
or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge 
and religion faith, the weight of custom falls 
away, the truth breaks through the veil, and the 
72 



most trivial object or accident comes to reflect 
in itself the whole system of nature or the whole 
providence of God. At such moments man real- 
ises that in order to live he must die, that in or- 
der to be free he must obey, and that only by 
surrendering his fancied independence can he 
enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of 
the self from its own bondage art contributes its 
share. The poetic genius, like the speculative 
and the religious, penetrates the monotonous dis- 
order of everyday life, and lays bare "the im- 
passioned expression" which is there for those 
who can read it. The dramatist, for instance, 
with whom the novelist is here compared, shows 
us some elemental force of humanity, stripped 
of the accidents of time and place, working itself 
out in free conflict with other forces, and finally 
breaking itself against the eternal fact that no 
man can gain the world without first losing him- 
self. It is thic catastrophe which makes the real 
tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet 
has the eye to see and the words to portray ; and 
in proportion as we can follow him in imagina- 
tion, we come away from the spectacle with our 
own hearts broken and purged, but strengthened 
to face the fact and obey the law. The novelist 
does with inferior means, and for minds at a 
lower level, what the dramatist may do for a 
mind at its highest. He idealises enough to make 
us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us 

73 



forget ourselves. He excites curiosity or sus- 
pense, not awe or hope. If the novel ends well, 
it flatters our complacency with the feeling that 
the world as it is is not such a bad place after 
all; if it ends badly, it strengthens the indolent 
conviction that aimless misery is the law of the 
universe. There are however two ways in which 
novels may be of real service and value. If they 
cannot teach men how to live, they may, through 
the wide range of their subjects, enable those 
who have already found a principle of life to 
give it a freer application than their limited cir- 
cumstances would otherwise allow; the "ficti- 
tious experience" may "give expansion to the 
personal/' while the personal gives reality to the 
fictitious, and thus may be mitigated that "sac- 
rifice of the individual to society" which the mod- 
ern division of labor tends to bring about. And 
secondly, by appealing to such various classes 
and capacities, and exhibiting the identity of hu- 
man nature under such various circumstances, 
novels supply a vehicle through which the force 
of public opinion may work, fusing differences, 
breaking down prejudices, and checking the 
"despotism of situations." The essay concludes 
characteristically with the refusal to believe that 
democracy is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold 
fast to the faith that the 'cultivation of the mass- 
es/ which has for the present superseded the 
development of the individual, will in its matur- 

74 



ity produce some higher type of individual man- 
hood than any which the old world has known," 
so, though in the novel "the creative faculty has 
taken a lower form than it held in the epic and 
the tragedy," "we may well believe that this tem- 
porary declension is preparatory to some higher 
development, when the poet shall idealise life 
without making abstraction of any of its ele- 
ments, and when the secret of existence, which 
he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may 
be proclaimed on the housetops to the common 
intelligence of mankind." 

Readers of the essay who are also novel- read- 
ers will be inclined to say that the writer was not 
much in sympathy with his subject; and he him- 
self, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curi- 
ous that I should have been successful in an es- 
say on novels, about which I know and care lit- 
tle, and should have failed in both my efforts in 
theology, for which I care considerably." At the 
same time it is probably true, as he once said, 
that he had read more novels than his friends 
gave him credit for, and it is certainly true that 
what his reading lacked in extent it made up in 
intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in 
fiction was for forcible delineation and robust 
humor. The flavor of strong, healthy individ- 
uality was what attracted him; for rarities, nice- 
ties, and abnormalities of mental organisation he 
cared nothing. He liked things which he could 

75 



take hold of with his mind, not things which 
merely gave him sensations, pleasant or painful. 
Both in his deepest and his lightest moods he was 
absolutely simple and "above board," and this 
simplicity made him keenly alive to the proxim- 
ity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquis- 
ite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the 
animal in him, and was never troubled by his 
appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If 
obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laugh- 
ter or to grim contempt ; he never dwelt upon it, 
either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For 
rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he 
had no need. The view of life suggested by so 
much of the best French literature, that thinking 
men are generally in a practical dilemma be- 
tween the extremes of sensual excess and of 
spiritual exaltation, did not commend itself to 
him in the least." The only forms of art to 
which he was keenly susceptible were those of 
oratory and poetry. He had no ear for music, 
though he seemed to get a certain exaltation 
from listening to it. In regard to painting and 
sculpture he always professed himself incompe- 
tent, but he was not without decided tastes. On 
his first visit to the Continent he was more at- 
tracted by Rembrandt, Holbein, and Diirer than 
by the Italians; "these men," he said, "grasped 
the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints 
at Munich he writes, "I could contemplate them 

76 



with interest for hours ; he has contrived to give 
St. John an almost perfect^expression of 'divine 
philosophy'." In later years when he went to 
Italy he spent a good deal of time in looking at 
early Italian pictures, and admitted that they 
would soon have got a great hold upon him. But 
on the whole his attitude to the arts (excluding 
those of language) was one of deferential ignor- 
ance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he 
did not even write verses. Yet to his friends, as 
one of them says, "he never represented the 
prose of existence. With all his gravity, with 
all his firm grip on fact and material interests, he 
had the enthusiastic movement of the world's 
poetry in him." — From the Memoir by R. L. 
Nettleship, Green's 'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. xxx- 
xxxiii. 

B. HEGEL ON THE NOVEL 

Among the mongrel forms of epic should be 
included the half descriptive, half lyric poems 
which were popular among the English, dealing 
chiefly with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. 
There belong also to this division numerous di- 
dactic poems in which a prosaic content is 
dressed up in poetic form, such as compendiums 
of physics, astronomy, and medicine, and treat- 
ises on chess, fishing, hunting, and the conduct 
of life. Poems of this sort were most artfully 
elaborated by the later Greeks, by the Romans, 
and, in modern times, especially by the French. 

77 



Despite their general epic tone, they lend them- 
selves readily to lyric treatment. 

More poetical, but still without the character- 
istics necessary for definite classification, are ro- 
mances and ballads. Being epic in content but 
lyric in treatment, these products of the Middle 
Ages and of modern times may be assigned to 
either class indifferently. 

The case of the novel, the modern popular epic, 
is very different. Here we find the same wealth 
and variety of interests, circumstances, charac- 
ters, and human relationships, the same world- 
background, and the same handling of events, 
that characterize the true epic. But there is lack- 
ing to it the primitive poetic state of the world, 
in which the true epic took its rise. The novel, 
in the modern acceptation of the term, presup- 
poses a prosaically ordered reality. But working 
from the basis of this reality, and moving within 
its own circle, the novel, both as regards pictur- 
esqueness of incident and as regards characters 
and their fate, retrieves for poetry (so far as 
the above presupposition permits) her lost pre- 
rogatives. 23 

1 In simpler terms : The novel, being a form of epic, 
should have all the characteristics of poetry. But this 
is impossible because it is compelled to work in the 
humble field of prose. Nevertheless, by a skilful use 
of description, narration, and dramatic situation, it 
causes a poetic oasis to spring up in the desert of prose, 
and so wins back some of its poetical rights. 

78 



Thus it happens that the struggle between the 
poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of 
outward circumstances is for the novel one of 
the commonest and most suitable conflicts. This 
struggle may end comically, or tragically, or in 
a reconciliation of the opposing forces. In the 
last case the characters who at first oppose the 
ordinary world-order may, by learning to recog- 
nize the true and abiding elements in it, become 
reconciled to the existing circumstances, and take 
an active part in them; or, on the other hand, 
they may strip off the prosaic hull from deed and 
accomplishment, and thus put in the place of the 
original prose a reality which is on intimate and 
friendly terms with beauty and art. 

As far as the range of representation is con- 
cerned, the true novel, like the epic, requires a 
complete world and a complete view of life, the 
many-sided materials and relationships of which 
exhibit themselves in the particular action that 
is the nucleus of the whole. As to details of con- 
ception and development, however, the . author 
must be allowed great liberty, for it is difficult to 
bring the prose of real life into the representa- 
tion without sticking fast in the prosaic and com- 
monplace. — Hegel, 'Aesthetik.' 3.TI1I., Kap. III. 
Abt. 3., S. 394-396. 



79 



LBJLU 



